Page:H. D. Traill - From Cairo to the Soudan Frontier.djvu/100

82 the senses and the soul of the beholder that make the great temple what it is. Those Atlantean columns, which were built, surely, to uphold the heavens themselves, and which seem to bear up their enormous surmounting monoliths as a giant would lift a child, have no suggestion of unwieldiness in their colossal size, leave no sense of excess in their multitudinous number. The calyx-capital into which each column blossoms would take ten men to span its monstrous girth; yet it opens out against the blue Egyptian sky above its roofless head as lightly as if it were the finest Gothic tracery above an English cathedral nave.

Everywhere the feeling of absolute fitness, of perfect proportion redeems this majestic hall of the offence of mere Brobdingnagerie; and whether the eye dwells upon the parts or sweeps the whole—whether it travels through the endless alleys of this forest of stone, and rests by turns upon base and shaft and flower-like capital of its component columns, or